A widower with a small daughter named Snow White, the King falls in love with Ravenna, a beautiful woman who, in little time, brings him to the altar. Ravenna, however, is a wicked woman devoted to magic, she kills the King and has Snow White locked in a tower. The years pass, Ravenna builds a kingdom of terror and remains always young and beautiful thanks to her ability to suck the beauty from the courtiers, until she realizes that Snow White has surpassed her in beauty, so the woman decides that her next sacrificial victim will be precisely her stepdaughter. Snow White, however, manages to escape into the forest and Ravenna hires a hunter to retrieve her and bring her back, so she can complete her ritual.
It is still not clear whether we should praise or curse Tim Burton and his "Alice in Wonderland", given that the great public success of his reinterpretation of "Alice in Wonderland" has (re)launched the fashion of fairy tales in cinema. Burton made the worst film of his career and the trend has not continued in the best way, since the next step was the cloying fantasy-romantic-teen-horror "Red Riding Hood". Then came "Snow White" in double version with the eponymous film directed by Tarsem and "Snow White and the Huntsman" by Rupert Sanders; if the first is a colorful film for families rather faithful to the Disney imagination, the second is a dark fantasy that takes many liberties with the fairy tale transmitted to us until it touches the horror genre.
We are not in the disappointing "Snow White in the Black Forest", where a certain horror imagery was almost forced in the fairy-tale context, rather the screenwriters Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock, and Hossein Amini have succeeded in finding the right compromise between genres that makes "Snow White and the Huntsman" an adventure film, with some moments of spectacular action (especially the long finale with the siege of the castle), the inevitable romantic insertions (less than one might expect) and unexpected points of violence and suggestions typical of horror cinema. What paradoxically works less is the fantasy element. If the scene with the terrifying troll in the forest is of great impact, it is equally out of context and frankly irritating, the part where the dwarfs lead Snow White and the Huntsman to the area of the enchanted forest. Beyond the beautiful digital sets, the abundance of fairy beings that crowd this sequence is really thrown in without reflection, creating a disconcerting effect that brings out the counterproductive uselessness of such a choice. Fortunately, we are talking about only a handful of minutes, then the film returns to tracks more suited to the dark iconography of which it boasts.
As for dark-horrific suggestions, "Snow White and the Huntsman" contains a long part in the forest that surrounds the Castle capable of being truly unsettling, in which the spores that hover in the air cause terrifying hallucinations capable of materializing the worst nightmares of those who breathe them. Appreciable and curious, moreover, the implicit parallelism between the evil queen Ravenna and the historical character of Erzsebet Bathory, the famous bloodthirsty countess who bathed in the blood of the courtiers to stay young and beautiful. Here, there is no talk of blood, but the concept does not change and the evil queen played by an always excellent Charlize Theron is the true engine and focal point of the film.
In the rest of the cast, Kristen Stewart, an anomalous warrior Snow White who, although far from the Disneyan ideal that we all have in mind (perfectly embodied by Lily Collins in Tarsem's film), proves convincing and demonstrates real growth in the career of the actress of "Twilight". Good also the characterization given by Chris Hemsworth ("Thor"; "That House in the Woods") to his Huntsman, a widowed and resentful mercenary less stereotypical than one might expect, but above all Sam Spruell ("The Hurt Locker"; "Defiance"), who has the perfect appearance to embody the slimy and malicious Finn, Ravenna's brother. Parade of known faces (digitally elaborated) for the seven dwarfs, among whom we recognize Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, and Nick Frost.
The debutant Rupert Sanders thus crafts an appreciable work and impeccable in look, not memorable but curious in mixing the fairy tale with a macabre imagery dear to the horror genre.
And the vein of revisited fairy tales will continue with "Maleficent", that is, "Sleeping Beauty" from the point of view of the wicked Grimhilde, and "Oz the Great and Powerful", a version signed by Sam Raimi of "The Wizard of Oz".
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